The Silent Age of Animation

Early Animation

This section of the History of Animation covers animation in its most primitive forms. There are no stars, no series, nothing concrete.

Now, this era of animation has no known starting point. Why? Because in fact, animation as a whole is as old as mankind itself. Even in early cave paintings you can see and tell that even back in that time we were trying to simulate motion with pictures in some way as a form of communication. As times changed and knowledge grew, many toys and gimmick tools came around to take advantage of what we call Persistence of Vision - basically, playing a trick on our eyes.

You may know some of these truly ancient examples as tools like a circle with two strings which you spin - a bird on one side, a cage on the other. Spin fast enough, and it looks as if the bird is trapped in the cage. (You can actually see this device used at several points in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow.)

Another well-known tool (and a precursor to even the earliest film projector) is the Zoetrope, which was a wheel with several different pictures stamped on it. Take a wild guess at what happens when you spin the wheel fast enough. A similar, modern equivalent would be something like a View-Master, but not so much like a slide show.

As far back as the late eighteenth century, there were also "Magic Lantern Shows", which were the forerunners to cinema. Essentially they were someone moving silhouette puppets around on the equivalent of an overhead projector against a translucent painting as background, accompanied by a band or narration.

But it would still be a while before the medium would truly begin to take shape...(1300)

The Silent Age of Animation

The earliest age of mainstream animation known to man, lasting from the early 1900s to the late 1920s with the rise of sound technology.

Now, animation has existed for a very, very long time in some form of another before this era came about, but this era is obviously when large amounts of people actually started taking notice of the medium and what it could do. This is owed in part to the rise of the motion picture to begin with during this time period. The earliest known/existing cartoon as we know it is the 1908 French short filmPhantasmagorie by Emile Cohl (while there were many experiments with stop motion and pictures earlier, this was apparently the first one to rely entirely on genuine hand drawn animation).

But here in the west, thanks to men like Winsor McCay (who made Gertie the Dinosaur, the very first cartoon character to have any distinct personality traits, and not to mention the man practically pioneered the use of animation as we know it in general. He experimented with animation as an "extension" of the comics he was working on during that time period) and not to mention Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, who both created iconic cartoon star Felix the Cat, the cartoon industry quickly sky-rocketed, with many new cartoon companies with their own cartoon stars and imitators quickly popping up to cash in on the new cartoon craze.

Winsor McCay was not happy with the idea of "Assembly Line" cartoons and regarded their work as inferior to his own. This was justified, in that he spent years working on his cartoons like Little Nemo (he was also the same man who made the original comics), Gertie the Dinosaur, The Sinking of the Lusitania (considered by many hardcore animation fans to be his Magnum Opus), and How a Mosquito Operates, which are some of the most spectacularly animated works ever seen and were masterpieces compared to the quickly, cheaply produced toons that were being rushed out at the time. Not long after cartoons rose in popularity, he left the very animation industry that he helped get off the ground in the first place.

Cartoons at the time were both seen as and presented as moving comic strips, sometimes even incorporatingSpeech Bubbles for their dialog. Fantasy was in full vogue during this period, but it tended to have a dull, heavy handed and literal minded feeling to it, not helped by the primitive, stiff animation, glacial pacing and floaty motion. And because animation was so experimental at the time in its early stages, this resulted in quite a few instances ofDeranged Animation, as animators experimented with the medium. Max and Dave Fleischer actually got their start off in this era, with their Out of the Inkwell series, starring Koko the Clown. During this time, the most prominent animation house was the studio of J.R. Bray, who produced many hit series such as "Colonel Heeza Liar" and "Bobby Bumps".

Walt Disney got off to a brief start in this era with his doomed Laff-O-Grams studios and Live Action/Animation shorts collectively called The Alice Comedies, but he finally found success later at Universal Studios with his character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. However, after losing Oswald and most of his animation staff over a contractual dispute, Disney quickly left Universal and formed his own studio. He and his friend Ub Iwerks ended up creating their own Captain Ersatz for Oswald: Mickey Mouse. However, the first two shorts, Plane Crazy andGallopin' Gaucho, were not particularly well received...and then came along Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to have sound. Also, contrary to what is generally believed, Steamboat Willie was not the first sound cartoon-the Flieschers had pioneered sound cartoons as early as the mid 1920s, with their film Mother Mother Pin A Rose on me^note , and not long before Steamboat Willie came out, Paul Terry, then an employee ofVan Beuren Studios, made a synchronized sound cartoon called Dinnertime. However, Steamboat Willie was the first sound cartoon that actually took genuine advantage of what could be done with sound in a cartoon (and reportedly, Walt Disney saw Dinnertime himself and proclaimed it "terrible.").

Naturally, the silent age came to a screeching halt with the rise of sound technology in the late 1920s. Disney and many other studios quickly worked to take advantage of the new technology, while former stars like Felix the Cat attempted to make the jump to sound film and failed miserably, quickly fading off into obscurity until many years later, with an ill-fated Golden Age revival during the 1930s and the iconic TV series which debuted in the late 1950s.

This era was succeeded by the far better-known Golden Age of Animation, which would last even longer and become even more influential and recognized than this era ever was.(5 300)

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 913